Blog Post

Refocused on Chrome OS, Jolicloud’s Drive puts all of your cloud storage together

I’ve lost track of how much online or cloud storage I actually have from Google(s goog), Dropbox, OneDrive(s msft) and others. I think it’s around 1.3 terabytes at this point. More importantly, with so many different online storage providers, I couldn’t tell you where a particular file is if I had to go find it; there are just too many places to look now. Enter Drive, which aggregates multiple cloud storage services into a single place in your browser. Drive launched least year as Jolidrive but is being reintroduced with the rise of Chrome OS devices.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/98314193]

Drive is the brainchild of the Joli team which debuted the web-based Joli OS, now known as Jolicloud, in 2009. It has more than 1.5 million users of the software. And like me, many of those 1.5 million users have files stored in multiple places in the cloud. That’s where the new Drive service comes in, which is part of Jolicloud’s new effort to help those who work in a browser.

The HTML-based software works in Safari(s aapl), Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome; there’s also a Chrome app that works offline and, of course, Drive works on Chrome OS devices as well. Signing in to Drive shows the file explorer with the option to add Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, MediaFire, One Drive, Put.io, and SugarSync storage. I was able to add both my Google Drive and Dropbox accounts into Jolidrive and then move a file between the two.

I had to use a menu option for that, but Drive Pro users can pay 5€/month for true drag-and-drop file moves. The Pro version also supports multiple accounts from a single cloud storage service. I have two Google Drive accounts, for example: One for work and one for personal use. The Pro option would let me aggregate both of these file systems into Drive.

There isn’t yet a universal search feature that I can see on Drive, so I’ll still need to search different cloud services for specific files. Still, I like what I see here, particularly for Chrome OS users.

At the moment, you can’t aggregate cloud storage services in Google’s web-based software platform. The Files app in Chrome OS shows your local storage and one Google Drive account, plus any external storage you may have connected. Drive brings a browser-based solution to Chrome OS, adding all of your data in the cloud to a single browser window.

Just to note, JoliOS was not “web based,” it was a version of Ubuntu Linux. JoliCloud was the web-based thingie, which essentially consisted of a visual bookmarks page for all the web-based apps a given user had installed on his JoliOS system.

Joli eventually ditched JoliOS (sad to say; it was a pretty great little easy to use operating system) after apparently determining it wasn’t popular enough to keep upgrading.

Good post. What I also like in ghe new Drive is the simple graph on the right showing the free space left for every cloud service. I would love a summary page of all my clouds storages with their free space and other datas.